Wafers are manufactured by a very complex manufacturing process. Various inspection tools and review tools have been developed in order to detect defects and classify defects that occur during the manufacturing process.
A wafer evaluation process usually includes inspecting the wafer with an inspection tool to detect suspected defects, extracting defects of interest out of the suspected defects and classifying the defects.
The wafer evaluation process should be tailored in order to satisfy seemingly contradicting requirements such as high reliability, repeatability, low rate of mistakes, high throughput, high resolution, vast amount of information, limited processing and storage resources, and the like. In addition, despite the large number of suspected defects that can be found by an inspection tool only a small portion of these suspected defects are processed further by other tools or by operators.
The outcome of this tailoring process is known as a recipe. A recipe includes the optimal methods and processes that should be applied during the evaluation process.
The following publications relate to spatial signature analysis: U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,718,526; 7,359,544; 6,841,403; and 5,991,699.
There is a growing need to provide a method and system for improving the spatial signature analysis of inspection defect maps. There is further a need to provide a method and system for assisting in optimizing a recipe in terms of both duration and performance.